Seventeen Level Switch Capacitor-Based Cascaded Multilevel Inverter with Low Device Count

This paper proposes a novel cascaded multilevel inverter (CMLI) structure based on switch capacitor (SC) tech-nology, which is capable of achieving up to 17 levels. The inverter is constructed by cascading two SC-based 9-level MLI basic modules, resulting in a 17-level SC-CMLI structure. The proposed inverter employs a reduced number of power switches, floating capacitors, gate drives, and dc sources, making it easy to implement. The Nearest level Control PWM technique is used to generate the switching pulses for the proposed 17-level CMLI. The proposed inverter is simulated under different modulation indices and dynamic load change conditions. The output voltage waveforms have significantly less total harmonic distortion (THD) content of 5.18%. The theoretical analysis of the proposed inverter is verified using MATLAB/Simulink software. Overall, the results demonstrate that the proposed 17-level SC-CMLI is an efficient and practical solution for high-power applications. This topology can be extended to higher voltage levels.